


A Wheel Within A Wheel

by lindsey_grissom



Series: Closest Thing To Family [4]
Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-10-24
Updated: 2009-10-24
Packaged: 2017-10-10 13:48:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/100458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lindsey_grissom/pseuds/lindsey_grissom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>There's an order to death.  To a long lingering death.  He thinks...</i>  Fourth in a series of Laura-Billy friendship one-shots.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Wheel Within A Wheel

She dies in stages. He watches in silence as she fades. _{mostly, sometimes he's so loud he wonders why she never shouts back}_ One piece at a time.

There's an order to death. To a long lingering death. Without the sudden shock it hurts more to see, he thinks. The end of the Worlds didn't feel like this and he lost them all. _(but her)_ But she defies the orders, the patterns written before her time. She's unique and that hurts more too.

It's subtle at first, so subtle he nearly misses it. She takes up religion. She binds herself to a faith he can't possibly follow and one he's certain she only half believes. And he knows religion plays a part in death, but it's usually lost not gained. She was saved from a quick death to live out a painful one. He can't see any Gods in that. But she does and sometimes, _{sometimes}_, he prays for her at night.

She stops talking about any future but the Fleet's. She uses those words and no pronouns and he can tell she's not thinking about herself as more than just a tool. She's so selfless that he wishes she could teach them all that lesson. _{before she goes}_ He cries at night when he knows she's asleep.

He fights himself, of course. Because the Doctor is still treating her and if he can just convince her to do more than Chamalla then maybe, just maybe, the prophecy is a myth after all. It isn't until she throws herself at the bullets meant for him that he admits she's dying and nothing will help. He holds her hand through the bars and tries not to think of whose he'll hold when she's not there.

He's not there when she loses Elosha. But he knows that he missed her losing another part of herself, when the Commander tells him she thinks he'll replace her one day. He doesn't think that he can, not without her there to guide him. _{but who else would lead in her example?}_ When she doesn't hug him he knows that's something else that's already dead. She's cutting people out of her life to save them and he wonders why he's the first. He feels her hovering by his cot when she should be sleeping and then he knows. He starts to run out of tears.

Her grace disappears in tiny movements, like an echo of everything else. And she breaks more patterns because everything is so natural and if she tries, she can trick them all into seeing her as she was. But not him. Sometimes she grabs his hand as she stands and it might look like he offers on his own _{such a gentleman}_ but it's the flinch they don't see and the hard grip on the chair arm that makes him. She leans on him more at the end of the day, when she hasn't stopped for the lunch he would have brought to her if she had asked. He makes sure she drinks before meetings because she doesn't want the Commander to see her shake when she holds a cup. When she doesn't get up at all because he's all that will keep her standing, he wraps her in a white robe and asks the Commander to be quick.

Hope is the last to die. And it's oddly poetic that it is. She is hope, and her hope and theirs should fade together, he thinks and then he's too busy holding her up to think at all. He knows the Commander cries when she turns away. They both know this is the last time they'll see her standing and she's barely on her own feet at all. He puts her to bed and when she pulls him down to kiss his cheek their tears mingle somewhere between. She whispers his name and he thinks he might have called her something other than Roslin or President but she's already asleep. He calls Cottle and warns him. _{not long now}_

It isn't until she smiles at him, clutching his hand tight with so much life, that he realises he had started to fade with her. He stays by her side long after she falls asleep and because he still can, he counts her breaths.

 

**End.**


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